The Importance of Connection

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"I call it my room dyslexia. So it takes me, I can read the room, but it takes me longer," she says. "If it's noisy, and if people are standing close to me or it's hot, then I am significantly less likely to be able to actually do that reading." The author was influenced by a book called Blind Rage about Helen Keller which is part of her own experience.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

JOANNE LINKS

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Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

KATHERINE LINKS

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